A consortium technology blog with a focus on virtualization, datacenter infrastructure, and cloud computing.

Author: Aaron Sweemer

I'm a Senior Systems Engineer for VMware and I work out of my home office in Cincinnati Ohio. I spend the vast majority of my day evangelizing all the wonderful things VMware, virtualization and cloud computing can do for my customers. In my spare time (which isn't much) I update this blog, which I started in May of 2008. And every once in a Blue Moon, you can find an article of mine over at Virtual Strategy Magazine.

When I started VirtualInsanity in 2008, I never anticipated what it would become. Instead of just place where I would post random thoughts ever so often, it has become a place that many new and part-time bloggers have come to call their virtual home. By this measure alone, I think VirtualInsanity can be deemed a…

I remember many years ago when I was studying at the University of Maryland, one of my professors listed WordPerfect as one of the requirements for his class. So I went down to the campus bookstore and bought a copy. The clerk handed me a big bulky box and I remember thinking “gee, this…

Back in June I was asked to build and captain the vFabric SQLFire lab at VMworld. Now, I’ve been a big champion of the vFabric technologies since the beginning, so I was certainly excited to be given the opportunity. But I don’t think I fully realized just how fortunate I was at the time. Because…

Ever since the acquisition of springsource nearly two years ago, VMware has been generating a lot of excitement in the application development space. That excitement was kicked into high gear a few weeks ago when VMware announced the industry’s first implementation of open PaaS, CLOUD FOUNDRY. But I have a feeling much of that excitement…

If you’re a VMware fan, you have probably already seen the graphic above, or some variation thereof. And you’re also probably already pretty familiar with the blue layer, or the Infrastructure layer of the cloud computing “stack.” In addition, you’re probably well versed in the orange layer, or the End User Computing layer. But what…

If you couldn’t attend VMworld 2010 which occurred last week, here is what you missed (in no particular order) … Breaking Records … VMworld 2010 by the Numbers How big was VMworld this year? Bigger than ever. Here are some statistics you might find interesting. 17,021: The number of registered attendees. This is up from…

If you have read Easy vSphere Web Apps with Grails and the VI Java API or Easy VMware Development with VI Java API and Groovy then you know I’m a big fan of Steve Jin’s vSphere Java API. And I recently received the following email … Folks, We are running a survey to better understand…

You may have noticed over the past few years there have been a number of authors here at Virtual Insanity. Some have contributed only once or twice. Others contribute (or plan to contribute) on a regular basis. In fact, there are now seven authors who call Virtual Insanity home (ordered by number of posts) ……

A few weeks ago I wrote a post with a very similar title, “Easy VMware Development with VI Java API and Groovy.” Today I want to expand on that a little bit and show you a cool way to quickly stand up web apps for VMware vSphere using Grails. What is Grails? If you’re familiar…

Have you ever wanted to write a script or an application that automates your VMware VI3.x / vSphere environment, but lack the development skills to do so? Or, maybe you have development skills, but you’re looking for ways to simplify your code and improve your productivity? In either case, I’ve stumbled across something you’ll definitely…